How Tammy Peterson’s Extraordinary Healing Sparked a Life-Changing Conversion
Inside This Episode
Before her childhood sweetheart Jordan Peterson catapulted into the public arena, Tammy Peterson was living a relatively ordinary life. Almost overnight, their family of four became central figures in an ever-raging culture war. As if these newfound pressures were not enough, Tammy was soon diagnosed with a rare, fatal cancer. But as she shares with Maybe God guest host Justin Brierley, the very thing that aimed to end her life birthed a surprising new faith in God and conversion to Catholicism.
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Tune into Tammy Peterson’s Podcast: www.youtube.com/tmrpeterson
Watch Jordan Peterson’s full interview on EWTN: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGQnfIy0lx8
Follow Justin Brierley’s work: www.justinbrierley.com
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Transcript
Eric Huffman: On this episode of Maybe God…
Jordan Peterson: Totalitarian systems are ruled by a sort of singular top-down tyrant. Hitler, Stalin, Lenin. It's like, no, a totalitarian state is ruled by the lie.
Eric Huffman: Jordan Peterson has become one of the most influential speakers in the world. His videos and lectures on major social issues have earned him millions of followers and no shortage of critics.
Woman: I want to go talk to Peterson. Peterson, do you have any comments on the Nazi presence at your protest?
Eric Huffman: Today, Maybe God guest host Justin Brierley speaks with Jordan's wife, Tammy, about her husband's meteoric rise to fame and his surprising stint in a drug treatment center.
Tammy Peterson: It happened in a day. It happened in a moment. There were reporters in the kitchen in the study with my husband on the porch and in their cars outside. And we thought that would stop, and it never stopped.
Eric Huffman: Also, Tammy shares how a terminal cancer diagnosis helped her find faith in God.
Tammy Peterson: I went home to tell my son, and I saw deep grief in his eyes. I saw that his mother was dying, which was a whole different scenario than that I was dying. It seemed common sense for me to say to him, "Only God knows when I'm going to die. We're going to go ahead now with gratitude for each day that we have together."
Eric Huffman: That's all today on Maybe God.
[00:01:21] <music>
Justin Brierley: Hello Maybe God listeners. My name is Justin Brierley. If you were listening in 2023, you know I've been guest hosting episodes of the Maybe God podcast from the UK, sharing with you some really remarkable stories of people from all different backgrounds coming to faith in God.
Now, since I left my hosting duties at the Unbelievable? radio show and podcast early last year, the focus of my work has been on the surprising rebirth of belief in God that I've personally been witnessing over the last few years. And that's also the focus of my latest book and podcast of the same name, The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.
Well, today I'm excited to share with you an interview with a woman whose recent conversion to Catholicism has really captured a lot of people's attention. Tammy Peterson is host of the Tammy Peterson podcast and wife of well-known and sometimes controversial Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson.
Jordan rose to global prominence in 2016 and his YouTube channel and live lectures have been watched and attended by millions. Since the Peterson family was thrust into the spotlight, Jordan and Tammy's personal lives have been colored by multiple health struggles.
Firstly in 2019 with the news that Tammy had a rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer and only 10 months to live, followed almost immediately by Jordan's lengthy recovery from a prescription drug addiction. In the midst of that rollercoaster few years, Tammy experienced a remarkable healing that led her to faith in God. And just a few weeks ago on Easter Sunday, she was officially confirmed into the Catholic Church.
So let's jump right into my recent interview with Tammy Peterson.
Tammy Peterson: Thanks very much, Justin. I'm happy to be here.
Justin Brierley: I feel like this is very much a family affair. In the past, I've interviewed Jordan, I've spoken to Mikhaila as well, and now you. It feels like the whole family in some way is coming together in this way. You've had an amazing journey recently, Tammy. Tell us about what happened over Easter weekend. You were received into the Catholic Church. What was that day like? What were your feelings?
Tammy Peterson: It was joyous, really. I was very relaxed and accepting. I had surrendered already to the inevitability of entering into the church. It wasn't my plan, particularly. It was a plan that came upon me. I was just willing to go with what seemed like the next right step until there I was receiving the rights to become a Catholic. I
Justin Brierley: Is that something you'd have ever anticipated, I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago?
Tammy Peterson: I don't think so. I was a pretty strong self-willed woman. I'd always been in control of my life and making my decisions. When we're small and young, we get through life with our childhood ideas of what is the best way to deal with the challenge that comes to us. And if we don't have a personal relationship with God, and maybe even if we do, because we're children, the choices we make about how we're going to deal with things are childish in some way. And if we don't update that childish plan, then that's how we go out into the world.
So, self-will was something that I discovered early on, and that seemed to serve me well when I was young, but eventually, it just didn't serve me well anymore.
Justin Brierley: Was faith ever part of the picture growing up? Were there any influences upon you?
Tammy Peterson: Yes, there were. My grandmothers were both in the Protestant church. My dad's grandmother played the piano in her church, and my other grandmother sang in the choir in her church, and they went to church every Sunday.
In fact, my grandma who played the piano, once her husband had had a stroke and was in the hospital at 83, she did some traveling around Alberta playing the piano in a band that was faith-based, that came from the church. So the church was always some part of my dad's life.
I was young in my family, so I was five years younger than my youngest sister and eight years younger than my brother. There were three of them, my brother and my two sisters. I was just talking to them, actually, because I don't remember my parents being in church at all. But my sister said that she remembers going to church, that my dad took her to church, but by the time I came along, he was deep into curling and golf and real estate and insurance. So he was deep into the material world. So my experience was more secondhand.
Justin Brierley: It's a very similar story, I'm sure, to many people who perhaps there's been some background sort of relatives in the faith to whom it just sort of slipped away. As you say, it sounds like you kind of became a very self-reliant person, in a sense, you didn't necessarily feel the need for faith or religion in your life. Obviously, that did change quite dramatically in recent years.
Now, just before we talk about this health crisis that precipitated this journey towards Catholicism, I'd love to just set it in the wider context because, as I say, you'd already been on quite a ride up to that point. You'd obviously been married for some time to your childhood sweetheart, Jordan, a successful academic clinical psychologist. But by 2018, he'd been experiencing this meteoric rise to prominence. His bestselling book, 12 Rules for Life, his message about responsibility and identity and purpose, and the wisdom actually found in the Bible were attracting thousands to these sellout tours and auditoriums and so on. What did life look like in the midst of all of that, this sudden rise to fame that was happening to Jordan Peterson at this point?
Tammy Peterson: Well, it definitely was sudden. It happened in a day. It happened in a moment. Jordan came down in the morning and said he could see deep trouble brewing, and he felt that he had to say something publicly. I said, "Well, you've been talking to me about these problems for 30 years. Why don't you just tell everybody? Let's see what happens."
Jordan Peterson: I'm very concerned about what's happening in the universities. There are continually things happening, including in the administration here and in the broader political world, that make me very nervous.
Tammy Peterson: And so that afternoon, I was home, my son was home, and we were both on the phone and there were reporters in the kitchen, in the study with my husband, on the porch, and in their cars outside. And we thought, "Oh, I guess this is what happened." We thought that would stop and it never stopped.
Woman: The presence of Nazis and white supremacists assaulting people at your protest, do you have any comment on that?
Jordan Peterson: Yeah, I do. White Nazis. I've studied Nazism for a very long time. It's been four decades. And I understand it very well. And I can tell you that there's some awful people lurking in the corners and they're ready to come out. And if the radical left keeps pushing the way, they're going to come.
Woman: That sounds very much like a threat.
Woman: Jordan Peterson, you've said that men need to, quote, "grow the hell up". Tell me why.
Jordan Peterson: There's nothing good about people who don't grow up, don't find the sort of meaning in their life that sustains them through difficult times. And they're left bitter and resentful and without purpose and adrift and hostile and resentful and vengeful and arrogant and deceitful and of no use to themselves and of no use to anyone else and no partner for a woman. There's nothing in it that's good.
Tammy Peterson: It was very overwhelming, and not just logistically, but of course the university had questioned his attendance there. He still taught for another semester after that before he finally retired, but everything was up. His clinical practice, should he continue to do that? Because he wasn't able to concentrate like he could before, and so he didn't think that was fair to his clients.
So there was a lot up in the air, and because I was home, I was able to be an ear for Him. I could listen, and I could say yes. You know, something that we laugh about is He was quite distraught at everything. It was kind of spooky, because it felt like our house was going to be attacked. Maybe our windows were going to be broken. I think the only thing that happened was somebody pushed over our garbage cans one night and flipped me a bird, and I just yelled, "God be with you" because it's just like, what are you going to do in this situation?
Justin Brierley: Yeah, extraordinary stuff. I mean, what you're referencing here is in a sense the early rise of Jordan. I would say the genesis of the way in which Jordan kind of became a bit of a cult figure to many people. I really began to engage with his work when I started to see his lectures on the Book of Genesis being shared quite widely online. And I was just stunned to see hundreds of people turning out for a good two or three hours of just an in-depth lecture on the Book of Genesis. I thought, goodness, how many pastors would love to have that kind of thing going on in their church and attracting a demographic that is often missing, actually, in many churches, interestingly?
Then I had the enormous privilege of hosting him in a conversation when he came to the UK on an early tour in 2018 to promote 12 Rules for Life opposite atheist psychologist Susan Blackmore. Again, I was so surprised to find Jordan, although not a professing Christian, really speaking on behalf of the Christian vision of humanity and being made in God's image and so on.
So he's always been a very, very interesting person to me as a Christian myself, as someone who obviously is almost a prophet from outside the church, kind of reorienting people back towards the value of Christian faith in that way.
Then as far as I'm aware, you've often, I think, traveled with him as he's been able to now speak to hundreds of thousands of people around the world as well, Tammy.
Tammy Peterson: Mm-hmm. That's right. I traveled with him in 2018, and I also went to the Bible lectures, and I couldn't believe. There would be people lined up, blocks and blocks of people, every Thursday night to get into this theater and listen to him speak, which was phenomenal. He couldn't believe it. And it was young men. It wasn't just young men, but it was virtually all young men that were there.
And I sat in the crowd. I went anonymously. I worked on logistics with him to make sure that he was fed and got to the theater on time, and was rested and all of that. So I looked at how he was conducting his days so that his lecture would go well. But I was sitting in the lecture, and I talked to people.
Sometimes if there were protesters outside, I went and I talked to them too, to see what it was that they were up. And they were so confused. And we've seen that now, what they're like. But they were grabbing onto something that was... what was it? It was that a driver in, I think it was Vancouver, had mowed down some people and killed some people, and they had all their portraits up outside of the theatre, and they were upset about it. And I thought, yeah, you know, "That's a terrible thing, but what are you doing here?" And they couldn't put into words what they were doing there. They were just outraged.
So people are outraged by what's going on in the world, but they don't know what to do with it. The ones that had come in and listened to Jordan, they're finding a way, right? They're finding a way to listen to him and to find some common sense in their lives and to find what I found. I found courage and strength and guidance.
Justin Brierley: Tammy spent nearly a year on the road traveling with Jordan. During that time, she was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma, a form of cancer that isn't usually fatal. After an operation to remove the cancer, her doctor discovered a much more deadly condition and delivered the news that she had only 10 months to live and a 0% chance of survival.
Tammy Peterson: He called me into the office, myself and my husband, and his hands were shaking and he was getting me to sign forms for another surgery because he said actually what we found when we looked at the biopsy more carefully was that you have something called a Bellini tumor and a Bellini tumor is very aggressive and we see that it's gone into your lymph system and we need to get you back in surgery as soon as possible.
I thought, "Well, that's too bad. But these things happen to people, and it's conceivable that it's happening to me." So I went home to tell my son. And when I told him, I saw deep grief in his eyes. And when Jordan and I were told, Jordan was sitting in the office, the doctor was talking to both of us. We were both receiving the news.
So the first person I told was Julian. And when I told him, I saw that his mother was dying, which was a whole different scenario than that I was dying, because I had always been in control of my life. I could decide if I was going to accept this prognosis. But when I looked in his eyes, I realized that I wasn't alone, that I was intricately involved with my son and my daughter and my sisters and my dad, who was still alive and there were friends and relatives and all of these people. And I thought, "Wait a minute." I could feel the weight of the world lift off my shoulders. As they say, I didn't know what that was.
It seemed really, all of a sudden, common sense for me to say to him, you know, "Julian, only God knows when I'm going to die. The doctor, he has an opinion, a medical opinion, but it's an opinion. It's not a certainty. Only God knows when I'm going to die. So we're going to go ahead now with gratitude for each day that we have together."
Justin Brierley: I'm interested in the fact that you kind of almost accepted that diagnosis with a lot of equanimity yourself, and also that you turned, in a sense, to God rather than your own ability. You said, actually, this is ultimately in God's hands. I suppose that is what that kind of diagnosis does. It makes you feel how precious life is when you're suddenly confronted with a diagnosis that potentially could cut that life short in that way.
Tammy Peterson: Absolutely, and I think I'd had plenty of moments in my life to turn to God. I'd had other brushes with death when I was a teenager and when I was a young woman. I even saw my life flash before my eyes on a ski hill once when I thought I was going to hit a rock on the way down a mountain. But those things they didn't make me reflect at all, really.
And that's one thing I think about women who become mothers. You become mothers and your child becomes more important than you. That's a step forward that's necessary for maturation and for the acceptance of God as the Father, and as the one and only who can decide how your day is going to go. I think that when I looked at my son, it was that relationship that had first had me surrender. I surrendered to my babies, for sure.
Justin Brierley: You've used exactly the word I was thinking of, the idea of surrender. I think a lot of people do, when finally God makes an inroad in their life, it is that sense of surrender. There's a certain kind of peace and serenity that comes with that, even in often very troubling circumstances.
Now this obviously was hugely challenging. You were then in hospital for some time. Tell us about the friend who started visiting you and praying with you on a regular basis.
Tammy Peterson: So I went to the hospital and I had the surgery and it seemed to go fine. We were very stressed the night before, but they said that they got everything and they took out my whole kidney and all the lymph on one side. I went home and started to get better. But then a week later, my feet started to swell, and it looked like they hadn't cauterized all of the lymph. And so my body fluids were leaking into the interstitial spaces in my body and filling me up with fluid. So I was drowning. I went back to the hospital, and they put a tube in my side to drain the fluid. They took nine liters of fluid off my body, so it was substantial.
You know, I guess maybe I was pretty healthy, considering what had happened, and my body was pretty resilient. So all my organs and everything were able to sustain what they were doing under duress like that. So they took all the fluid off and took a lot of the duress away.
Then I had a nurse come every day to drain a liter of fluid off. I still wasn't comfortable after that, not at all. They told me not to eat any fat, give the lymph system a break, and then maybe it would heal. So that's what I was doing at home. I was laying in bed, really, and eating nothing but vegetables and trying to get better.
But as time went by, my vital signs started to get less and less virulent. I was not holding up. My son was with me and his daughter, and they took my blood pressure a couple of times, and they couldn't get my blood pressure. So then I went to the doctor, and he put me back in the hospital again. This time in emergency because they thought I was going to have a heart attack, because that's what happens when your electrolytes go out of balance.
I went into the ICU and they put me on fluids and everything and tried to balance everything out. And I kind of came to in the ICU, realized how sick I was. And then they put me in my own room and I thought, "That's probably not a good sign because they don't know what to do with me." You know, when you go to the hospital, if you're with a lot of people, that's a good sign. Just remember that when you think you'd like a lot of privacy, you don't want any privacy, because that means they're giving you a view, because that's all they can offer.
So when I was in that room, I got an email from my friend Queenie, and she asked if she could come and visit. And I said, "Sure." She came with a couple of rosaries and a picture of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus in an Asian form, because Queenie is Asian. And she left me this portrait, and she said that these rosaries had been blessed by the Pope, and she asked me if I wanted to pray the rosary, and I said, yes, which surprised her because she didn't expect that—she told me later.
So we went down to a nice part of the hospital that is called the atrium. It is four or five stories high with trees in it and benches to sit. Anybody who could get there from the hospital rooms would go there because it was very much like being outside. So it was a really lovely place to go. And she went there the first day and taught me the Joyful Mysteries, and then she realized after that that she was going to have to teach me the Sorrowful Mysteries because that was the next day.
So she came back the next day to teach me the Sorrowful Mysteries. That went very well too. So then she thought she better teach me the other two, so she taught me the Luminous Mysteries and the Glorious Mysteries. By then it was four days of her coming. And it just started to be a rhythm of things that she had never... this was not in her mind to do. It's just the way it worked out.
She came with me and would pray with me for two hours every day. And she saw how deeply I came into it, right? She wasn't going to say, "Oh, well, I'm done." It just didn't seem like the thing to do.
Justin Brierley: So this carried on for quite some time, Queenie, praying the rosary with you. For those who, and I include myself here, Tammy, I'm not very familiar with the rosary. How is that distinct from perhaps any other kind of prayer that you might pray?
Tammy Peterson: Well, first of all, you have a set of beads, right? So you have these beads. I've been reading about the history of the rosary. So it's very cool history because it used to be 150 beads. It was a lot of beads. Monks used it. It was a prayer rope, really, essentially. It had nothing to do with the rosary at the beginning.
It was actually the monks in France. There was a priest, he was from the Dominicans, that took an interest in it and devoted himself more to understanding what it was about. Then the bubonic plague came, and they took it to England. There was another monk in England who had been praying to Mother Mary before he went into the seminary. He would pick a rose for each prayer for Mother Mary, but when He went into the cemetery, they wouldn't let Him bring any roses in.
So He would imagine these roses with the rosary when He was praying, and eventually His devotion and Him associating it with roses, they took the name the Rosary. So that didn't happen until I think it was something like the 15th century. Then it's come to what it is now. But it has a very long history.
Each of the mysteries is a gospel story. So it's kind of an interesting way to go through the New Testament every morning. That is a good introduction to the Bible, in a way. You know, I've showed the rosary to my little grandchildren, and they love the rosary. And they're very interested in it.
I think when they're really little, they like the rhythm of the prayers because it is repetitive, right? Then maybe that's why a lot of people don't pick it up is because it's so repetitive. But I did a lot of meditation. I've been meditating for a very long time. So when I came to the rosary, the whole meditation came to me very easily, and it seemed good to me right off.
So when I spent my time with Queenie, we would share the prayer, where she would pray the first half of, say, the Lord's Prayer, and I would pray the next half of the Lord's Prayer, and she would pray the first half of the Hail Mary, and I would pray the second half of the Hail Mary. That was the way that we went through the whole rosary, it was together. But at the beginning of each mystery, she would tell me the story that went along with that mystery.
And for the joyous mystery, that's the Annunciation and Mary's story of humility. so one way that you can pray the rosary is to imagine what the story is, and then imagine what one of the virtues might be that comes out of that story. And for the first one, well, it would be humility. So I would pray on humility. Queenie prayed with me. She'd just say, who do you want to pray for? So we would choose someone to pray for.
It started out being my family members, mostly, that I was praying for. And I still have people I pray for. My sister's very sick, so that's heavy on my heart. She's gone to Manchester. She's only 69. She's in a nursing home. It's very sad. But my other sister has taken care of her through these last few years, so it's as good as it can be. And she's a peaceful person, so that's also amazing. So I prayed for all of those people. And my dad was dying, and of course, I couldn't see him. So it was sad. So I cried, just like this.
Eventually, the prayers became more. I'd pray for my dad, but I'd pray for all old people, or I'd pray for my sister, I'd pray for all sick people. I'd pray for particular people, but then I would universalize. My prayers have grown and changed over the years. And Queenie, once I left the hospital and she came back weeks and weeks later, and I was still praying the rosary. And she was quite surprised because I kept doing it. It was comforting.
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Justin Brierley: While Tammy was in the hospital, still with a big question mark on where her health was headed, Jordan was prescribed a higher dose of his anti-anxiety medicine, benzodiazepine, to cope with the stress of her fierce cancer battle. That prescribed increase led Jordan to a dangerous drug dependency and eventually to a drug detox treatment in Russia.
I've heard an interesting story that you actually sort of prophesied almost when you would be out of the woods to Jordan. Do you want to just tell us about that?
Tammy Peterson: Sure. Jordan wasn't feeling very well. He should have been in the hospital probably, although I doubt that, because people with his kind of trouble, they just keep putting you on drugs, and that's not the right way to do it. You've got to take them off the drugs.
But whenever I'd go to pray the rosary, I'd come back, he'd be sleeping in my hospital bed. So I think that was a sign he should have been in the hospital, because he was there with me as much as he could have been. So I was watching Jordan, and I was seeing how much he suffered, and that was heavy on my heart. So I don't know, I thought if I could say something that would be comforting to him, that might be helpful.
I just said what seemed reasonable. You know, I've had surgery, the cancer is gone. I just have this leak that is keeping me in the hospital and they can't find the leak. But I think that, you know, things will be solved by the time we have our anniversary in August. That's what I think. I wanted to give him some hope that this wasn't something that was just going to be forever, and he was going to have no life because it was all-consuming.
He was still managing to write some, but it was pretty dire the whole time for about however many months that I was sick for everyone to carry on with their lives. So I wanted to give Jordan some hope, and that seemed like a reasonable thing to say. And so that's what I said.
Justin Brierley: And it turned out that it was actually on the date of your anniversary that you received the all-clear effectively. Just quickly tell us what happened there.
Tammy Peterson: I was in the hospital, they were looking for this leak, they couldn't find it. I had gone down to the States to where they thought they could surely find this leak. I went to this hospital in Philadelphia and I met Max Itkin who was a good doctor and he told me he was going to find it.
The first day they were just going to put needles in my belly with a dye that they had put in with poppy seed oil and they were just going to look for the leak through a screen because they had MRI-guided visualization which we didn't have in Canada. He assured me he was going to find this leak. But if he didn't find it that day, in the next week they would come and do something a little more invasive and then eventually he was going to put me back together. He assured me of that.
So the day of the surgery, I went into surgery and I came out and they hadn't found the leak. So they put me back in the room and I hadn't eaten in five weeks because eventually I'd had food right into my heart to keep me nourished and that actually helped me to really be with it.
When I went down there they took that out and they gave me again nonfat food, but they told me that in five days they were going to cut me open and look. And I thought, Oh, that's terrible, because the lymph system is like a spider web in your body. I mean, I just can't imagine having that kind of job and the pressure that you're under and the guidance that you must need from God, because good Lord, it's impossible work. And I knew it was impossible work.
Obviously, it was impossible work, because I hadn't been able to find this leak for... Now it had been two months, and nobody had been able to find this leak in my system. I was doing all right. They gave me a place to eat outside, and just outside the room there was a nice little place to eat. My family was there again. My son and his wife were there, and my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law, and her kids, and my husband. So they were all there. They had Team Tammy t-shirts that they made.
Anyway, it had been four days, and I knew that this surgery was coming, and I thought, Oh, geez. They told me the one way that they could tell if the lymph was closed or if it was working properly or not, because I didn't know... I had this bag still of fluid on my side. They said, if there's something that looks like fat, so it's cloudy, that means that there's still a leak and it's leaking into this bag. So if you ate some fat, then we'd have an idea that it was still leaking.
So I thought, well, I'm not going to wait for them to tell me when to eat some fat. I'm going to just eat. So I ordered something, and I can't remember. I think it might have been eggs that I ate. I looked in the little bag afterwards, and I didn't see anything. And I thought, Well. I did what I could do. I ate the fat and that was the test. Okay, it's a fat challenge.
But the next morning I was sitting outside and the nurse and one of the interns came and they told me that I was going to have to do a fat challenge. And I said, Oh, well, I did one last night. And they said, Oh, let's see the bag. I said, okay. So I lifted it up and it was clear. And for some reason they believed me that I'd eaten something the night before. And they said, Oh, well, if the bag is clear and you ate a fatty meal, then the hole is closed. It's not open anymore. So as far as we're concerned, we don't have to do anything more, you're healed.
So they had me go back in the hospital and I took out the IV and everything that I was attached to. A half an hour later, I was out of the hospital and I went back to the Airbnb with my family. When I got there, we realized that it was August 19th, and that was our anniversary. And none of us had been paying that close attention to what day it was.
Justin Brierley: It's an amazing story.
Tammy Peterson: I mean, this was obviously very much part of the background to why you ultimately have been received into the Catholic Church, Tammy.
Tammy Peterson: Yeah, maybe, you know, because Jordan can't even explain it, which is hard on his logic.
Justin Brierley: This is Jordan Peterson talking to EWTN reporter, Colm Flynn, about Tammy's miraculous recovery from a condition that doctors deemed hopeless.
Colm Flynn: She is the only person in the world that we know of that has survived this type of cancer.
Jordan Peterson: And I looked, that one-year survival rate was zero. So, what do I make of that? I wouldn't say, for me, the fact of her success is evidence of the miraculous, perhaps any more than there's evidence of the miraculous around us all the time. But the one thing that was very strange to me, and I don't know how to understand was that she told me about three months before she recovered that she believed that she would be well by our anniversary. And that's exactly what happened.
The fact that she survived was very unlikely. But unlikely things happen. But the fact that she survived and she predicted when she was going to recover, that's a harder thing to wave away.
Colm Flynn: When you saw Tammy's newfound faith and now her conversion to the Catholic Church...
Jordan Peterson: Her deepened faith.
Colm Flynn: Deepened faith.
Jordan Peterson: She had faith of a courageous sort before that. She certainly had faith in the truth.
Colm Flynn: But how have you seen a change in her?
Jordan Peterson: She's less troubled in her soul. She's recovered that state of childhood that Christ associates with the kingdom. That's a remarkable thing to see because I also knew her as a child. So I can actually see that re-emerge. That's quite the bloody miracle. That is.
Justin Brierley: You've obviously been willing to see the hand of God in some of these things, these coincidences, and so on, even in very challenging times. I suspect, in all honesty, that all that prayer has really made a difference, not just to your physical state, but also to the way I think you approach God.
I often think that the prayer itself often gives you a different perspective on life. It forces you to stop looking at your own troubles and to focus on a much bigger picture and so on, to put yourself out of the frame so much. How did your family react to your increasing interest in Catholicism, in taking faith seriously in that way?
Tammy Peterson: Well, I think that they saw quite a change in me once I began to practice prayer. I think it is a practice, and I think that's what makes it necessary. It's a practice. When I was sick, and Jordan was sick, and didn't see each other for about two years, when we came back together, everything had changed so much, because we had both really been through the wringer and didn't know whether our marriage still made sense. But the things that we'd practiced were the things that survived, you know.
One of the things we practiced was having dates together. We decided one day to have a date, even though he was still very sick. But we didn't have to say, well, how do we do that? And where are we going to do that? We didn't have to do that, because we'd already done that for 30 years. It's like, oh, yeah, you know, go light some candles. I'll go have a shower. Put on something nice, and we'll meet. And we danced. And it was okay.
We had a moment together that was kind of normal. And we thought, Oh, okay. So our relationship survived. And that's why you practice prayer. That's why I practice prayer. So when my family sees me doing these things, they see the outcome of it. My husband has seen the outcome of it. My son and my daughter, I don't ask them how I've changed. They tell me, Mom, you've changed. You're a delight to be around. That's a gift.
Justin Brierley: Yeah, absolutely. The proof is in the pudding, as they say. By their fruits you shall know them. And in that sense, it's one thing to say, I'm a Christian or I practice prayer, but obviously it's once people see the real change in people's lives that that makes the difference.
I mean, you've already referenced that Jordan Peterson himself was going through some extraordinary health challenges. This really came hot on the heels of your own diagnosis. As you say, he was already obviously suffering even at the time you were going through your own thing. That itself obviously must have been incredibly difficult for the family. I mean, it must have felt like everything was sort of... after this extraordinary explosion onto the public stage, suddenly, everything was sort of collapsing around you. How did you deal with that yourself? How did the whole family deal with that? Do you see God's hand in any way in all of these ups and downs that the family has gone through in the last several years?
Tammy Peterson: No. I think I always see God's hand in everything now. But it was very strange, right? It was a very strange time, because first of all, I became sick, and then I had this experience that was very religious, when I felt the way the world leave me, and I felt filled with love, really, and peace. And that moment was my first moment of surrender, I would say. But then there were many moments of surrender as I went through my illness.
So by the time I was out of the hospital and Jordan was in the hospital, my life was about surrendering, and so I was surrendering to his troubles as well. And he knew that, and so did my family know that. And so whenever they talked to me, I was just, you know, God's will will bring us through this. However it comes out, it's not in our hands. There was a lot of struggle, right? There was a lot of struggle, but I wasn't struggling. I wasn't struggling at all.
I wasn't struggling for Jordan either. I had accepted that he had a cross to bear. He had been on antidepressants for years and years and years and years, right? From the time we moved to Toronto, he was on them. We went on them when my daughter was in grade two or three, so a very long time ago. My daughter's 31, right? So a long time.
He went off those antidepressants too quickly, and that destabilized him in a way that it kind of, I guess, makes your brain inflamed. So his brain was so reactive that it made him very, very, very anxious and unable to sleep. So he went to the doctor for something to help him sleep and to control this anxiety that was so overwhelming, really. He was just laying in bed. He was not able to do anything. But I don't think he realized, and none of us realized, that he'd gone off the antidepressants too quickly.
Then he took another psych drug, which obviously calmed down his brain. But in the aftermath of this neurological trauma, He continued to have neurological traumas with these psych drugs that the doctors kept giving him over the months, you know. So it was very complicated, along with how it began and then how it played out.
And so yes, he definitely had a lot of trouble, but it didn't really start with the benzodiazepines, it started with the antidepressants, which he had been on for a very long time.
Justin Brierley: There'd obviously been a long history and story there.
Tammy Peterson: Mm-hmm. People have to be aware of that because you have to go off of those drugs over very many months under a doctor's care, just a tiny little bit at a time, because the brain, gee whiz, you know, you have to encase it in bone. It's so delicate. You have to be careful with it.
Justin Brierley: Eventually, he did come through that. I remember listening and watching some of the early videos that he did just as he was beginning to emerge again from that really, really difficult period where he was having to come off and learn to just function again really. This is in early 2021. And I know that Mikhaila was very involved in helping him in that journey.
As he has emerged from that and come back into public life and as your family in the census again been exposed to all of that sort of, I suppose, inevitably, a lot of fame, criticism that comes with it, and everything else. The fact that you are now where you are, how has that changed the way, I suppose, your family deals with that? Does faith figure much, I suppose, in the Peterson family now, when it comes to the way you just approach life together, having been through this extraordinary few years?
Tammy Peterson: Well, I had plans to enter into the Catholic Church at Easter. A couple of weeks before, my daughter Mikhaila called me and said that she was going to be baptized. And she was going to be baptized on the same day that I was going to be confirmed into the church. And I thought, wow, that's a prayer for me that's answered.
When the kids were very, very young, I wanted to baptize the kids, and Jordan wasn't interested in it. And I didn't persist, and so I didn't baptize them. But it was always something that was heavy on my heart that I hadn't baptized my kids. But I was overjoyed that Mikhaila was going to enter the church. So yes, it's changed things.
I see miracles in my life every day because I pray the rosary. I try to get myself in the morning so that if there's anything on my mind that I've given it to God as soon as I wake up, so that I'm ready for whatever challenges God is going to give me for the day. And now and then I'd have challenges, and they'd work out in ways that I hadn't looked at, because I'm pausing and waiting for the way things are supposed to be, rather than imposing my will.
I'd call Mikhaila and tell her these stories, and she'd say, "Mom, I'm not there yet." And I'd say, "Well, that's okay. I just want to tell you what's going on in my life." Then eventually she called me and she said, "Yeah, I think something's happened to me." So she's now baptized and really trying very hard to have God's will give her the guidance that she needs.
The thing is, our family is definitely in the public eye. And so if we're going to be of service, this is the best way to do it, I think. So I'm all in as far as this goes.
Justin Brierley: We talked about your faith. You mentioned a little bit about Mikhaila's journey. I know many people in my circle of acquaintances, for whom Jordan himself has been quite instrumental in them actually opening the door to faith. Many people for whom he's kind of opened up the whole idea of faith and religion allowed them to take it seriously again. People who perhaps were very persuaded at one time by the Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris', you know, sort of dismissing faith and so on.
Obviously, Jordan approaches it very much through a psychological lens and through that Jungian kind of framework and so on, when he's talking about the value of the Bible and so on. Do you get a sense of how he makes sense of all this from where he's standing?
Tammy Peterson: I don't get a sense of it really. He's got a great understanding of it. He's getting so he knows the stories very well and understands what they mean, which is really helpful. His interpretations of the stories is like, yeah, that's what that means. I get it now. That's why people are listening to him is because they do get it now.
His story and his journey, that's Jordan's journey, and he'll enlighten us as it happens. I don't have any more information than anybody else does. But he's watching me. But he's definitely watching me. And he sees the changes that have come and he can't understand it. So he knows what it is. He's seen it now, very close hand. So we'll see what happens.
Justin Brierley: I know that his next book is We Who Wrestle With God. I just feel like there is obviously a wrestling going on there. But it's a wrestling that is fascinatingly… I think, God is using in remarkable ways, in all kinds of unusual, surprising ways. So I've personally been, in a sense, overjoyed to see the way in which so many people have benefited from that.
I published a book last year, Tammy, called The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. It features actually Jordan quite a bit in it, because I do feel like with the waning of the very sceptical new atheist approach, there has been a reawakening of a sense that people are looking for meaning and purpose and identity. There's this meaning crisis a lot of people are talking about in our culture. And your story again, just again, was another story where I've just been hearing so many people, intelligent, 21st-century people, who are suddenly bumping into God unexpectedly. I just wondered whether you've been noticing that yourself in any way recently.
Tammy Peterson: Well, even my thing that I went through, although it was unusual, other people are going through these things as well at the same time as I am. Even what Jordan's going through now, people are going through what he's gone through. So they're finding understanding, but through that understanding, they're finding surrender. And we need surrender in this world right now.
Traveling around, I can see that the people that come to see Jordan, they're in better shape than they were in 2018. The young men who came back in our first tour, they came by themselves, usually. Their stories were sad, most of them, but now they are usually coming with a partner, or their parents are with them, and they're telling us stories of years of putting themselves back together. They're coming together in celebration, really, and it's beautiful.
When I go out on stage, really, I thank them for coming, for taking the time out to listen to my husband, because he's got something to say to them. And then I bring Jordan out on stage. And they're so grateful to be there and to listen. And this book, it's all Scripture. It's all Scripture. So that's good, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know where it's going and why it's there exactly, except for it's necessary. I know it's necessary. And if Jordan has to be the one to talk about it, well then, so be it. So I don't know what that means for us, but I do know what it means for the world. I know it means that there has to be a rebirth. There has to be. There's too many people gone astray now and it's dangerous. It's dangerous.
Justin Brierley: Well, look, it's been a very hopeful, surprising conversation with you, Tammy. I really appreciate the time you've given and just the openness and honesty with which you've shared your journey and all of the ups and downs of it.
Tammy Peterson: My pleasure.
Justin Brierley: I'm just very hopeful as well. Just as is my personal opinion, one of the reasons why Jordan has connected with so many people is because he feels real. He just kind of wears his heart on his sleeve when he gets out on stage. I also sense that with you and the whole family dynamic. There's just a sense that we're watching something really real, not packaged and made perfect. You're all on a journey, you're all kind of working out what this means for yourselves. But I think this gives a lot of people hope that there's hope for their lives, for their messy, unscripted journeys that actually God can do something. It's quite amazing.
Tammy Peterson: Well, they have to be unscripted because it's not up to us to write the story. That's the adventure in it, Jordan says. But it's true that this is an adventure, our lives. And if you let that happen, all sorts of unexpected things are going to happen. It's going to be remarkable.
Justin Brierley: Well, bless you. Thank you so much for sharing some of your journey with us,-
Tammy Peterson: My pleasure.
Justin Brierley: ...for being my guest on the show today.
Tammy Peterson: Thank you.
Justin Brierley: If you want more about Tammy, I'll make sure there are links, of course, from today's show where you can find her podcast and more resources besides. But for now, thank you so much for being with me, Tammy.
Tammy Peterson: Thank you.
Julie Mirlicourtois: Maybe God is produced by Julie Mirlicourtois and Eric and Geovanna Huffman. Our associate producer and social media manager is Adira Polite, and this episode was edited by Brittany Holland and Justin Mayer. Donald Kilgore is the director of Maybe God's full-length YouTube videos. If you have any questions or comments about this episode, you can engage with us on Instagram, YouTube, or by emailing us at [email protected].
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